Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable”: A History of the
Foreign Relations of the United States Series

Chapter 6: “The Necessary Limitations Upon Open Diplomacy,”
1920–1945

Joshua Botts

Between 1920 and 1945, the Foreign
Relations series left its 19th century roots behind as it
experienced profound transformations in purpose, production, clearance
procedures, and audiences. In 1925, within months of the Department of
State’s recruitment of a professionally trained historian to take charge of
its publications program, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg approved the
first formal editorial guidelines for FRUS. Kellogg’s
order mandated historical “objectivity,” as derived from emerging scholarly
best practices, and served as the charter for the series (with minor
revisions) until 1991. Despite this high-level endorsement for Foreign Relations, unprecedented clearance problems,
both within the U.S. Government and with other countries, resulted in
steadily mounting delays and, occasionally, significant excisions in
published volumes. During the 1930s, political controversies over the
outbreak and legacies of World War I heightened foreign government anxieties
about releasing potentially sensitive historical information. World War II
exacerbated those difficulties. Counterpoised against this impulse for
secrecy, professional academic organizations lobbied for timelier
publication and more comprehensive documentation. Although FRUS continued to garner occasional congressional and media
attention, during the 1930s and 1940s, scholars established themselves as
the primary direct consumers of the series. By the end of World War II, the
Foreign Relations series had evolved to become an
instrument of responsible historical transparency.

Before FRUS could evolve, it
had to survive the loss of its 19th century utility. In the aftermath of the
First World War, Department of State officials assessed the Foreign Relations series. Over the previous decade,
the publication of FRUS had moved farther away from
the events it documented. Resource limitations aggravated the mounting FRUS lag that began in the first decade of the 20th
century.1 From 1909 and 1930, the period between the creation
and the publication of documents grew from 3 years to 12 years. This lag
became permanent; with only a few notable exceptions, no FRUS volumes produced after 1933 included documentation less than
15 years old.2 The growing publication lag meant that FRUS lost much of its value for Congress and other
government officials who wanted to mobilize public support for (or
opposition to) current policies. At the same time, the traditional scope of
the series left new constituencies, primarily the academic community,
unsatisfied with meager coverage of the decisionmaking process in
Washington. At this critical juncture, when FRUS had
grown too tardy to fulfill its 19th century function, the continuation of
the series remained in doubt. As late as 1924, the Department officer
responsible for the series reminded his superiors that he had “not yet been
informed whether Foreign Relations . . . is to be
continued.”3

FRUS survived the 1920s
because it evolved. To be sure, memory of its 19th century mission helped
sustain the series during this transitional period. High-ranking officials
noted that FRUS helped U.S. diplomats perform their
operational duties. Assistant Secretary of State John V.A. MacMurray, for
example, drew upon nearly two decades of service at diplomatic posts and
stints in the Department’s geographic divisions to explain that “it would be
as impossible for a consul to conduct the business of his office properly
without a set of Foreign Relations as it would be for
a carpenter to get along without a hammer and saw.”4 Despite this endorsement within the
Department of State, FRUS lacked a strong
constituency outside the Department during much of the 1920s.

By the late 1920s, the academic community began
championing the Foreign Relations series. In 1928,
former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes “put just a little push
behind” legal scholars’, historians’, and political scientists’ efforts to
promote FRUS by arguing “the only difficulties that
the Department of State . . . really has occur when people do not know the
actual truth.”5 This activism was an early return on the Department’s
decision to professionalize the production of the series in 1925.
Scholars—including the historians hired by the Department to compile FRUS volumes—brought new expectations for
thoroughness to the series. In helping to shape a new 20th century paradigm
for responsible historical transparency, the academic community defined new
standards for quality by criticizing past practices.6 In
1930, Dr. Joseph Fuller, who headed the Research Section of the Division of
Publications, derided the “perfunctory character” of the 19th century FRUS. He caricatured the contents of volumes
published before 1924 as “innocuous material—exchanges of birthday
greetings, records of ceremonial visits, formal documents, and emasculated
correspondence on more serious topics.” Returning to this approach in
response to clearance difficulties (described below) would, Fuller
predicted, lead the series to “lose all credit in the eyes of scholars who
would naturally depend on it for the material of their studies.”7 In providing public support to the
series—and in shaping professional norms that a new crop of professional
historian FRUS compilers would bring with them to the
Department—the academic community pushed Foreign
Relations toward a new paradigm that traded timeliness for
comprehensiveness in coverage.

Enter the Historians: Implementing the Kellogg
Order

The Department of State’s
professionalization of FRUS production followed a
series of decisions that seemed only tangentially related to the future of
the series. In late 1918, the Department of State appointed its first
official historian, Dr. Gaillard Hunt, to undertake a major project
documenting the Department’s involvement in the Great War.8 Hunt later
served as the first head of the Division of Publications (DP), the office
charged with responsibility for producing Foreign
Relations volumes, after it was created in 1921. Although Hunt died
before he could complete his “History of the World War,” the project raised
multiple questions about the future of FRUS. Although
Hunt had proposed a documentary history, he actually produced a hybrid that
coupled an interpretive narrative with a documentary appendix. Indeed, his
original title for the project made no reference to the FRUS series.9 Even before Hunt’s death, Congress and the
Government Printing Office balked at publishing the first volume of his
larger project under existing appropriations for producing Foreign Relations, arguing that the “History of the World War” was
something else entirely.10

The struggle to secure
appropriations for Hunt’s volume led the Department of State to reaffirm the
documentary character of the FRUS series. Even though
the Department ultimately found a way to incorporate Hunt’s work into Foreign Relations, the drawn-out process of
negotiating with Congress and the GPO—and Hunt’s death—gave officials an
opportunity to reconsider whether to continue Hunt’s project. Hunt’s
successor as head of DP, Harry Dwight,11
opined in May 1924 that “a Foreign Office can do great service by making
diplomatic documents and other historical records available to the public,
but I do not feel that it lies within the functions of a Foreign Office to
compete with the narrative historian.” Dwight also noted that the Department
staff’s lack of “any experience of serious historical research” militated
against continuing with Hunt’s project. In June, Wilbur Carr, Director of
the Consular Service and long-time supporter of the series,12
made the decision to maintain FRUS as a documentary
history.13

The Department also recognized the need to augment
the resources devoted to Foreign Relations.
Throughout the 1920s, Department officials pleaded with Congress for
appropriations sufficient to reduce the publication gap.14 In June 1924, Dwight reported that “the work of the
[Publications] Division has steadily been falling behind for the last 18
years” owing to a combination of increased expectations, diminished
manpower, and inadequate equipment. These problems hit FRUS especially hard. At the time, three members of DP had the
“theoretical” assignment of editing FRUS, but Dwight
reported that “they are constantly called off to do other work” for the
Department. He concluded that “any serious effort to bring Foreign Relations—including the war papers—up to date within a
reasonable length of time” required both additional personnel and adequate
office space.15

Although the Department
elected not to “compete with narrative historians” in 1924, it enlisted
professionally trained historians to assure that FRUS
met emerging scholarly standards. In December 1924, just as Great Britain
announced plans to publish its pre-Great War documents,16 the Department hired
Tyler Dennett, who earned a Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins
University, to take charge of the Division of Publications.17 Dennett quickly laid the foundations for a
new FRUS by proposing formal editorial guidelines to
define the purpose of the series and establish clear standards for omissions
in published documents. Less than three months after taking office, Dennett
submitted draft principles to Assistant Secretary MacMurray. In framing the
new FRUS charter, Dennett echoed familiar statements
of purpose for the series: “A well informed intelligent public opinion is of
the utmost importance to the conduct of foreign relations” and therefore “as
much of the [diplomatic] correspondence as is practicable ought to be made
public.” FRUS provided “in a form economical,
compact, and easily accessible, the documentary history of the foreign
relations of the United States” and, as such, “must therefore be recognized
as an important part of the duties of the Department of State.” Dennett
proffered four admissible justifications for exclusions:

to avoid “embarrassing current negotiations,”

to “condense the record and avoid needless detail,”

to “preserve the confidence reposed in the Department by other
Governments and by individuals,”

to “avoid needless offense to other nationalities or individuals
by excising invidious comments not relevant or essential to the
subject.”18

Dennett encountered minimal resistance to establishing an official
Departmental mandate for FRUS because the value of
transparency had been regularly acknowledged for 135 years. In 1925,
precedents established during the 18th and 19th centuries shaped the first
formal guidelines for deciding what kinds of information the Department
could release to the public responsibly and what kinds of information it had
to keep secret to safeguard the public interest.

Later in March, MacMurray hosted a meeting where
Dennett and other high-ranking Department officials held a “thorough
discussion of the principles which ought to guide the editing of Foreign Relations.” Their conversation yielded a
consensus that added two “innovations” to existing FRUS traditions. The first concerned including in FRUS “decisions of the Department on subjects of
international law which are of peculiar interest to students.” The second
entailed “publication of important documents concerning treaty negotiations”
(which had typically been covered by Supplemental FRUS Submissions in the 19th century) that would “increase the
value of Foreign Relations as a source-book of
American history.” Dennett informed Secretary of State Kellogg that “this
proposed new material ought to contribute to the promotion of interest in
questions of foreign policy and in turn assist in the maintenance of an
intelligent public opinion.” The consensus was also important because it
established “a uniform standard for . . . the editing of diplomatic
correspondence” for the entire Department. Moreover, Dennett believed that
publicizing the new FRUS guidelines would help the
Department “define some of the aspects of the necessary limitations upon
‘open diplomacy.’”19

With support from senior officials,20 Dennett secured Secretary of State Kellogg’s approval
for the far-reaching “Principles to Guide the Editing of Foreign Relations” as a Departmental Order on March 26, 1925.21 The order called for FRUS
to document “all major policies and decisions of the Department in the
matter of foreign relations.” It mandated that, aside from “trivial and
inconsequential details,” the volumes “be substantially complete as regards
the files of the Department.” “Nothing,” the order specified, “should be
omitted with a view to concealing or glossing over what might be regarded by
some as a defect of policy.” This required a caveat to Dennett’s initial
proposal to exclude “personal opinions” from published FRUS volumes: “in major decisions it is desirable, where possible,
to show the choices presented to the Department when the decision was made.”
Finally, the order instituted an important change from 19th century practice
that conceded the altered circumstances of post-World War American
diplomacy: a prohibition on publishing foreign government documents without
first securing that government’s permission. This mandate was originally
interpreted narrowly: only documents originating from a foreign government
required such clearance. The Department retained the authority to decide
whether to publish U.S. documents (i.e., authored by American diplomats)
that contained foreign government information (FGI), such as memoranda of
conversation with foreign officials.22

Even before final approval of the 1925 Order,
Dennett began evaluating Department records in preparation for reviving FRUS production. He was “shocked” by what he found.
In a letter to outgoing Secretary Charles Evans Hughes, Dennett described
how “the distinction which has been made between public and private papers”
had left the U.S. Government with “extremely defective” records of recent
diplomacy. He cited his own research in Theodore Roosevelt’s papers for his
work on U.S.-East Asian relations to explain “how much important diplomatic
correspondence was not a matter of record in the Department of State”: “the
Department records” by themselves were “so defective that the narrative of .
. . important events cannot be given from the official correspondence.”
Dennett’s “casual . . . survey” of Department records for the “war years”
revealed them to be “extremely deficient,” and, when such “deficiencies are
eventually revealed by the publication of the Department diplomatic
correspondence,” he warned Hughes, “the Government is then placed in an
awkward and embarrassing position.”23

Over the next several years, Dennett, Fuller, and
the DP staff did the best they could to prepare “substantially complete”
supplemental FRUS volumes covering the war years.
This effort was necessary because the Department excluded war-related
documentation from the regular annual volumes that it had already published
for the years 1914 and 1915. In his testimony for the 1928 appropriations
bill, Dennett also pointed out that “we are today about the only great
Government which has not given to the public its diplomatic correspondence
of the war period. . . . It seems to me that that correspondence, following
the practice of other governments, ought to be published.”24 Alongside eight supplemental “World War” volumes for the
years 1914–1918 (published between 1928 and 1933), Dennett’s team also
prepared four special volumes documenting U.S. policy toward revolutionary
Russia during 1918 and 1919 (published between 1931 and 1937). In addition
to Department records, they used whatever material they could gather from
former diplomats to help “get the papers which we have into their proper
relation to one another.”25 Efforts to augment FRUS coverage
of the critical war years culminated in 1940, when the Department released
two volumes comprised of documents collected from files taken by Robert
Lansing at the end of his term as Secretary of State and later returned to
the Department’s records.26

The Kellogg Order’s mandate for comprehensive coverage from Department files
presumed that the Department of State controlled U.S. foreign policy.
Virtually all the documents published in the volumes covering the 1920s
(produced between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s) came from the
Department’s central files. When other U.S. Government agencies, like the
Departments of Commerce and the Treasury, led the way in using U.S.
financial and commercial power to pursue political objectives during the
1920s, these efforts remained outside the scope of Foreign
Relations.27

Despite the consensus to
publish a “substantially complete” record in FRUS
that Dennett secured in 1925, he and his staff encountered opposition from
their colleagues in the Department as discussion shifted from general
principles to publishing specific documents. In 1929 and 1930, concerns
about the risks of releasing sensitive information jeopardized Dennett’s
efforts to revive the series and close the widening publication gap. The
1916 supplement for the war was “held up” in 1929 by Secretary of State
Henry Stimson and President Herbert Hoover pending the conclusion of naval
arms limitation negotiations with Great Britain.28
Boundary disputes in Central America also led to several excisions in the
regular volume for 1918 at the behest of the Division of Latin American
Affairs.29

Dennett’s most significant debate involved
supplementary volumes on the Russian Revolution. On April 25, 1930, Dennett
met with officials in the Division of Far Eastern Affairs (FE) to discuss
their opposition to publishing U.S. reporting on conditions in Eastern
Siberia and Manchuria in 1918. FE officials feared release of those
documents would “constitute an indictment of Japanese activities, the
appearance of which in an official series might give such an offense as to
embarrass the present conduct of relations with Japan.” Roland Morris, the
former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, supported Dennett’s arguments that his
telegrams “formed an essential part of the record and should be included” if
FRUS were to document the story of Japanese
“military authorities’ breach of faith” and the “American Government’s moves
to check” their expansionism. Nevertheless, he agreed with FE Chief Stanley
Hornbeck that “this story had better be left untold in our
publication.”30 The new Department regulations for FRUS notwithstanding, Morris and Hornbeck dismissed
historical integrity when they feared it could endanger current
diplomacy.

Dennett resisted FE’s restrictive impulse. He complained that excising the
documents dealing with Japan’s role in Russia would “ruin three volumes”
representing “a year’s work apiece by three members of our staff and the
expenditure of over $5,000 for printing.” To excise “the record of Japanese
action and American reaction is to leave out an essential part” of the story
“and to present a mangled and transparent farce which would be worse than
the total omission.” Dennett also recruited support from the Division of
Eastern European Affairs, which judged “the story of America’s relationship
to the interventions in Russia . . . one of the most creditable aspects of
our Russian policy. Its omission . . . would seem to result in a disturbance
of the balance unfavorable to the credit of our Government.” By enlisting
support from other Department officials, Dennett forced his colleagues to
take a wider view of the choice confronting them. Whatever risks the 1918
Russia supplement posed to U.S.–Japanese relations, the Department had to
balance them against the possible benefits of clarifying the limits of
American intervention in the Russian Revolution and meeting the Department’s
publicly announced commitment to responsible transparency.31

Dennett’s arguments won the day, but he paid a
price. The Department published the 1918 Russia supplement volume with the
Japan material intact in 1932. Just as FE warned, the volume elicited “a
good deal of comment and discussion in Tokyo.” Although the Japanese
Government did not lodge a formal protest, Ambassador Katsuji Debuchi
registered concern about the publication with Secretary of State
Stimson.32
Dennett, however, took a leave of absence from the Department in 1930 and
resigned in 1931. A few years later, his successor Cyril Wynne recalled that
Dennett “resigned from the Department . . . [to] wide publicity [that]
resulted in much unfavorable criticism . . . partly because he believed the
provisions of the [Kellogg] order were not being complied with.”33 Although his desire to complete his biography of John Hay
(which would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1933) certainly figured into his
decision to leave the Department, Dennett’s resignation revealed the
potential costs of advocating transparency.

Some of these costs were borne by the FRUS volumes themselves. Even with a growing
publication lag, early 20th century FRUS compilers
had to make tough decisions when the Department’s or another government’s
reluctance to release significant documents stalled the publication of other
important material. Amidst the debate over the 1918 Russia supplement
volumes, Fuller suggested jettisoning the “annual volume” model in favor of
more topical volumes “relating to single or small groups of countries or
subjects over convenient periods of years.” Not only would such compilations
allow for streamlined clearances within the Department, but “volumes on
certain subjects could be held back without delaying others and without
impairing the integrity of the publications issued.” Fuller anticipated that
delayed publication of volumes covering especially sensitive regions or
topics would “be less obvious than when brought repeatedly to public notice
by glaring omissions in one annual volume after another.” Fuller’s scheme
would “break up Foreign Relations into handier, more
logical units” that could be produced, cleared, and published more rapidly
than the existing annual volumes. It also offered a more finely-textured way
to reconcile the Department’s general commitment to transparency with
specific diplomatic and security sensitivities.34 Fuller’s prescriptions
were not adopted during the interwar period. Although additional
supplemental FRUS volumes covering Robert Lansing’s
papers and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference were later incorporated into the
series, the Department continued to produce and release FRUS as a single compilation for each year until after World War
II.35

During the 1930s, U.S. diplomats criticized FRUS for releasing documents that risked jeopardizing
current relations, deterring candid reporting, and curtailing frank
discussions. In 1936, Engert, Minister and Consul General in Addis Ababa,
cabled Near Eastern Affairs Division Chief Wallace Murray to warn that a
15-year gap for publishing documents invited all of those consequences. He
suggested either editing documents to “exclude any passages that might cause
embarrassment or offense” or waiting 25 to 30 years to publish previously
confidential information.36 In
1937, retired diplomat D.C. Poole criticized FRUS for
disclosing confidential communications with British intelligence officers in
revolutionary Russia. Although Poole’s concern about disclosing intelligence
sources and methods anticipated later efforts to accord intelligence
information special protections against disclosure, his complaint employed
the same “old diplomacy” discourse as Engert’s telegram. In 1919 Poole had
served as U.S. liaison with anti-Bolshevik Russian groups and as the de facto chief of U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts
in European Russia. Nearly two decades later, he wrote Secretary Cordell
Hull to protest the inclusion of one of his confidential despatches in the
1919 Russia volume. Poole saw no reason why “a little considerate effort”
was not made to “conserve a suitable regard for the conventions of
gentlemanly intercourse” and edit the cable in question to obscure the
source of his reporting, a British army officer. He predicted that the
disclosure would injure relations between U.S. diplomats and the British and
“tend to destroy that complete confidence which the public interest requires
to exist between American Foreign Service Officers and the Department of
State.” Poole suggested that the Department adopt a “more careful editorial
policy” for FRUS.37

Cyril Wynne responded vigorously to these assaults
on FRUS. Indeed, to address Poole’s letter, he wrote
a 45-page memorandum38 that left his superiors bewildered and
apprehensive about his judgment.39 Wynne deprecated criticism of the
series by describing the careful review and clearance process that preceded
publication to ensure that FRUS volumes conformed to
the 1925 order. He warned that retreating from a 15-year line would result
in thunderous criticism from the academic community. The Department
historian also belittled both Engert and Poole, suggesting that they “take
[themselves] perhaps a little too seriously.” Although he acknowledged the
“special authority” of “career diplomats,” Wynne preferred the friendly
attitudes of “such men as Mr. Joseph Grew and Mr. Howland Shaw, both of
whom,” he claimed, “have forgotten more about the Near East than Mr. Engert
will ever know in his life.” Wynne placed special emphasis on Grew’s support
for a 15-year line, since he served in Japan, “the most difficult post in
our entire Foreign Service.”40

Despite Wynne’s spirited rejoinder, Poole’s intervention altered FRUS clearance procedures for a brief period. In
producing the 1924 and 1925 annual volumes in the late 1930s, the Division
of Research and Publication (RP) submitted “a large number” of American
memoranda of conversation to foreign governments for clearance. Although
“higher officials in the Department” did not formally alter clearance
procedures to require these expanded clearance procedures for foreign
government equities during the interwar period, RP’s brief and voluntary
accommodation to foreign government anxieties foreshadowed how later efforts
to document closer U.S. coordination with other governments would complicate
clearances for the series.41

During the 1930s, the Japanese government generated
the most significant foreign clearance problems for the series. In the
mid-1930s, Japan objected to FRUS’s de facto 15-year publication line and U.S. policy regarding FGI.
By the end of 1935, RP identified Tokyo as the “usual” source of delays in
foreign government clearances. When the documents compiled for the 1922 FRUS volumes included information about the 1917
Lansing-Ishii Agreement’s secret protocol (pledging restraint in China
during World War I) that had already entered the public domain via the
former Secretary of State’s memoirs and a widely-read work of diplomatic
history, Wynne anticipated that Tokyo would object to their publication.
Through Ambassador Grew, he warned that the Japanese Government would be
blamed for any omissions of this material to “prevent the Department from
being criticized” by “those who are a bit critical of what is described as
the ‘Hush! Hush!’ policy in publishing Foreign
Relations.” The Japanese Foreign Ministry granted permission to
print the documents in FRUS but requested that, in
the future, even retired American officials should secure Tokyo’s permission
before publishing confidential information relating to Japan.42

Another source of clearance problems, Iran,
reflected intra-departmental disputes over Foreign
Relations. Iran clearances evoked fears in 1936 that U.S.
transparency would alienate the Shah, who was already offended by the
dissemination of critical American periodicals in Iran. As a result, the
1922 Foreign Relations volume lacked any
documentation on U.S. relations with Iran. In 1937, though, transparency
skeptics proved capable of persuading Tehran to cooperate with FRUS after senior Department officials backed RP.
Wallace Murray, who warned that even mentioning the U.S. Government’s
interest in publishing documents in 1936 could prove disastrous, instructed
Cornelius Engert, who had criticized FRUS the
previous year and was now stationed in Tehran, to suggest to Iranian
officials that “their present position with regard to publication of
material concerning them in Foreign Relations is
hardly in line with Iranian aspirations to be up-to-date and ‘Western’ in
the conduct of their affairs.” Engert secured permission to print the
requested documents from the Iranian Foreign Minister, and Iran returned to
the pages of FRUS.43

In these and other clearance debates during the
1930s, FRUS historians received support from openness
advocates both inside and outside the government. For many officials
responsible for conducting the nation’s foreign affairs, the series remained
a valuable resource. For example, when the transition to the Franklin D.
Roosevelt administration threatened austerity measures that would endanger
funding for FRUS, Morrison Giffen, a University of
Chicago Ph.D. who replaced Fuller as Chief of the Research Section,
explained that Foreign Relations—“the most laborious”
and “the best known”44 of the Section’s
products—proved useful to the Department since “to be without these
collections of ordered and carefully selected documents is to lack easy and
instantaneous access to the data upon which to form judgments.” Without FRUS, Giffen warned, “the Department’s officers would
often be compelled to take action after the most hasty and necessarily
superficial researches of their own.”45

The professionalization of FRUS production also helped mobilize an entirely new base of
academic support for the series as a vehicle for responsible historical
transparency in the late 1920s and 1930s. Dennett welcomed this development;
indeed, he cultivated it with a careful publicity effort for the
Department’s publication program.46 Professors of international law took a leading role in
supporting FRUS during the interwar years. In 1928,
the Teachers of International Law Conference formed a committee to lobby the
Department to accelerate FRUS production. In 1930,
when clearance problems sparked fears that the Department might abandon the
standards of the 1925 Kellogg Order, the committee insisted that, “from the
standpoint of teachers of international relations, . . . the discontinuance
of [Foreign Relations] would be a disaster.” In the
mid-1930s, the American Society of International Law formed a Committee on
Publications of the Department of State that issued reports lauding the
quality of recent FRUS volumes. Although not as
prominently involved during this period, the American Historical Association
and the American Political Science Association also lobbied for the Foreign Relations series—especially for a special
subseries documenting the 1919 peace negotiations that led to the Treaty of
Versailles.47

Individual scholars also praised the improved
quality of post-1925 FRUS volumes.48 In 1934, Yale University historian Charles Seymour
praised the World War I and Russian Revolution supplementary volumes for
their “comprehensive . . . range of documents . . . form[ing] the essential
stuff of the material which the students of American diplomacy in the war
period will use.”49 In a 1939 review of the 1921
and 1922 volumes, Institute for Advanced Study historian Edward Meade Earle
judged that 15 or 16 years was “a long time to wait for official papers, but
it is a relatively short time in view of the comparative completeness of the
dispatches and documents now made available” in FRUS.50 This support from
the academic community proved essential in persuading Congress to
appropriate the funds necessary to revive Foreign
Relations after 1925 and to hold the line against those Department
officials, diplomats, and foreign governments who wanted to restrict
historical transparency in pursuit of contemporary concerns.51

Despite those victories, by the late 1930s, the
Kellogg Order’s requirement to accommodate foreign government clearances
raised significant obstacles to the Department’s efforts to satisfy academic
requests to improve the timeliness of the FRUS
series.52 Academic demands to accelerate FRUS clashed with opposition from abroad to
publishing more recent diplomatic documents. In 1937 and 1938, U.S. media
coverage of foreign government clearance difficulties generated calls for
increased openness.53 The Department responded
by asking selected foreign governments to agree, in principle, to publishing
documents less than 15 years old. Nine capitals concurred, but also insisted
that Washington continue submitting documents for clearance.54 The French Government opposed
accelerating Foreign Relations,55 and Department officials agreed
that even broaching the idea with Tokyo would “result in the Japanese
Foreign Office making use of the occasion to insist on widening the present
gap rather than shortening it.”56FRUS historians faced a quandary: if foreign
governments were reluctant to let the United States divulge their secrets,
how could they improve the timeliness of FRUS without
sacrificing its higher—and publicly announced—standard for thoroughness?
And, as World War II approached, foreign government concerns about
revisiting the negotiation and implementation of the controversial Treaty of
Versailles mounted, intensifying the dilemma between timeliness and
comprehensiveness facing FRUS stakeholders.

“A Cramping Effect”

The first potentially
series-paralyzing clearance battle stemming from conflict between the
Kellogg Order’s requirements for comprehensiveness and its recognition of
foreign government equities unfolded as the Treaty of Versailles collapsed
in the summer and fall of 1938. In March 1938, the Department sought
permission from the Governments of France, Great Britain, and Italy to
publish documents from the 1919 Peace Conference. As the Department noted in
its instruction to posts in Paris, London, and Rome, memoirs and other
published accounts from virtually all sides of the negotiations had already
disclosed, in general terms, the discussions that produced the Treaty of
Versailles. The jointly “owned” formal minutes of conference proceedings,
however, remained unpublished.57

The nature of these documents posed unique challenges. Since any of the
countries with equities in the documents could veto their release, all
participants had to agree to publish or nothing could be done. Unlike
previous annual or supplemental volumes, Department historians could not
simply omit portions of the conference record that raised intractable
clearance issues. The volumes also required systematic research in private
papers that exceeded the Kellogg Order’s mandate that FRUS volumes “be substantially complete as regards the files of
the Department.” Casting this broader net required the Department to invest
additional resources and time for travel and copying documents.58

Although the Italian and British Governments gave
the desired preliminary approvals in the summer of 1938, the French
Government proved much more hostile to the project.59 The
French Foreign Ministry recoiled at the proposal to publish such politically
sensitive records in the midst of international tensions directly related to
the postwar settlement. When Director of Political Affairs at the French
Foreign Ministry René Massigli met with Edwin Wilson, Counselor of the U.S.
Embassy in Paris, he argued that “Europe was today in a highly dangerous
situation, perilously near war, and every effort was being made by those in
responsible positions to prevent war, to save civilization, and with that
end in view to appease conflicts and remove so far as possible every pretext
for misunderstanding.” Wilson reported that Massigli “was frankly terrified
at the thought of how publication of the secret documents of the Peace
Conference could be seized upon by people who want to promote trouble and
misunderstanding. As between the embarrassment . . . by being put in the
position of objecting to the publication of these documents, and the danger
of adding fuel to the flames of international controversies, he much
preferred the former.” Even delayed publication, Massigli worried, “might
merely prejudice the work of appeasement which might have been done in the
meanwhile.” Massigli concluded the conversation by pointing out that, “if
during the next month things take a turn for the worse, our thoughts may
look forward to the next peace conference rather than to the question of
publishing the documents of the last one.”60 After the fall of the Popular Front government produced
a “sweep” of Massigli and others from the French Foreign Ministry, Wilson
correctly anticipated that the Daladier government would be more amenable to
the project.61
French officials agreed to the Peace Conference project in late December,
allowing Cyril Wynne to announce it at the American Political Science
Association’s annual meeting on December 29, 1938.62
France’s initial opposition and subsequent acquiescence to the Department’s
proposal to publish the records of the postwar peace treaty negotiations
illustrated how the Kellogg Order surrendered a measure of U.S. sovereignty
over disclosing secrets in pursuit of preserving international comity.

The outbreak of the war created new difficulties for
the Paris Peace Conference volumes and, after the United States entered the
war, British and American leaders vetoed releasing especially sensitive
records out of fear that doing so could undermine their own summit
diplomacy. Even after the Department secured agreement in principle to the
project, it still had to obtain clearances for specific documents proposed
for publication. The first Peace Conference volumes appeared in 1942, in
part because the fall of France and hostilities with Italy nullified two
foreign equities that might otherwise impede publication. Great Britain, the
lone remaining foreign equity-holder, reluctantly agreed to release the
majority of Peace Conference records in 1942.63

The most crucial
documents, the minutes of the discussions of the Council of Four, remained a
concern because British officials feared that releasing the records of past
summits could undermine the confidentiality required for successful
high-level diplomacy during and after the current war.64 In
1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden
balked when the United States asked for permission to publish the Council
records. Eden explained that “the publication in particular of the minutes
of the Council of Four would have a cramping effect upon any similar
confidential discussions which it may be necessary to hold after the present
war.” He also worried that printing the minutes might “provide hostile
propagandists with welcome material.” Finally, Eden objected to the
publication of “rough workings kept for the convenience of the statesmen
concerned” while one of those statesmen—David Lloyd George—was still
alive.65

After the Department appealed the British
decision,66
President Franklin Roosevelt intervened to quash the Council of Four
volumes. In preparation for a September 1943 Hyde Park summit meeting with
Churchill, Roosevelt asked Secretary Hull why the U.S. Government intended
to publish the Council minutes. The President expressed “distinct
hesitation,” believing that “notes of these conversations ought not to have
been taken down anyway.”67 Roosevelt’s “hesitation” evoked bitter
resentment within RP. Staffer Philip Burnett surmised that the “real reason”
for the President’s attitude was the “wretchedly shortsighted” impulse to
avoid releasing any information that could potentially be used to criticize
a future peace settlement.68
Hull’s response to Roosevelt echoed the Department’s arguments to the
British Government, emphasizing the pressure from academics and Congress for
publishing the full record of the Paris Peace Conference, as well as the
information about the Council of Four discussions that was already in the
public domain.69

Roosevelt remained unconvinced. He told Hull that publication “would probably
result in wholly unwarranted sensational articles” from “hostile sources.”
He also explained that “no notes should have been kept. Four people cannot
be conversationally frank with each other if someone is taking down notes
for future publication.” Roosevelt “felt very strongly about this” and,
during his meeting with Churchill at Hyde Park, they vetoed publication of
the Council of Four minutes for the duration of the war.70 Only in November 1945,
after Lloyd George and Roosevelt had died and Churchill and Eden were out of
office, did the Department renew its efforts to secure British permission to
publish the minutes.71
The volumes appeared the next year72 and
Roosevelt’s intervention in the series’ publication schedule was itself
included in the FRUS volume covering the 1943 Quebec
summit, released in 1970.

Roosevelt’s reservations about publishing diplomatic
documents during World War II did not apply to material intended to mobilize
public support for the war effort. On June 17, 1942, Hull proposed to
Roosevelt publication of “papers pertaining to relations between Japan and
the United States dating from the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931
to the outbreak of war.” The compilation, which “would be of a character
similar to the Foreign Relations of the United
States,” “would cover American-Japanese relations in general and also
deal with the conversations of 1941 in regard to means of solving problems
underlying relations between the two countries.” While Hull “realized that
there are possible disadvantages to publication at this time,” he believed
that “on balance it would be desirable to publish these papers” since they
demonstrated “that this Government could not sit still and watch Japan carry
out a program of unlimited aggression to the menace of our national
security.” Since the envisioned compilation included many records of
Roosevelt’s personal involvement in prewar diplomacy with Japan, Hull wanted
explicit permission from the President to proceed with the project. On June
20, Roosevelt responded: “OK. Cover it all.”73 Although two FRUS volumes purporting to “cover it all” in U.S.-Japanese
relations between 1931 and 1941 appeared in 1943, some journalists
justifiably “criticized [the volumes] rather sharply as being only a partial
picture.”74 In 1943 and 1944,
the Department proposed an analogous project documenting U.S. policy toward
the European Axis powers before the outbreak of war. While Roosevelt was
“all in favor of the objective,” he believed that “the mechanics” would be
“difficult” because of the foreign equities involved in telling the story of
U.S. opposition to Hitler’s Germany.75

Rather than privileging historical integrity or
openness in government, public diplomacy considerations guided Roosevelt’s
decisions regarding FRUS during World War II.
Publishing the record of Wilson’s negotiations at Versailles promoted no
identifiable public diplomacy objective. Moreover, it seemed likely to
invite criticism of summit diplomacy at a time when Roosevelt relied on
personal meetings with Allied leaders to shape a strategy to defeat the Axis
powers and sustain cooperation after victory.76
The “Peace and War” volumes and the proposed compilation of prewar
counter-Hitler diplomacy, in contrast, did offer value at a time when the
U.S. Government was mobilizing public opinion with “white propaganda” in
support of the war effort.77 In the few exceptional
cases when FRUS garnered Presidential attention
during the war, Roosevelt deprecated responsible historical transparency in
favor of the nationalistic and politicized approach employed by European
governments debating war guilt during the 1920s and 1930s.

The FRUS production staff
remained committed to the new paradigm and persevered through other
obstacles related to the war. Their biggest shock came in September 1939,
when Cyril Wynne, who “had been in ill health for several months,” committed
suicide.78 Wynne’s deputy, Wilder Spaulding, a
1930 Harvard Ph.D., took charge after his death. In 1940, Assistant
Secretary of State Breckinridge Long chided RP for failing to adhere to
upgraded security procedures.79 In 1942, most of RP was moved to temporary
quarters on Constitution Avenue, which made it “less convenient . . . for
officers and employees of divisions in the main building to confer with” RP
staff.80 Despite these disruptions,
the FRUS production process proceeded relatively
smoothly when clearance difficulties did not interfere.81 The biggest threat to publishing the cleared
volumes during the war was a congressional proposal to reduce appropriations
for Department of State printing by 40 percent. The still-influential
octogenarian John Bassett Moore and other members of the scholarly community
successfully lobbied to reduce the cut to a more manageable 10 percent.82

Scholarly engagement with the Foreign Relations series during the war extended beyond lobbying
Congress for additional resources to addressing key questions about
editorial methodology and assuring the integrity of the series. In 1942,
Duke University history professor Paul Clyde inquired about material
withheld from the 1927 volumes. In response, Spaulding explained that the
selection criteria employed by FRUS historians to
keep compilations from growing “impracticabl[y] . . . bulky” necessarily led
to the omission of most political reporting, routine correspondence, and
other “background materials.”83 When Samuel Flagg Bemis cited gaps in a
critical review of the 1928 FRUS volumes in the American Historical Review, Ralph Perkins84 suggested that the Department invite the AHA to
“appoint a committee to investigate our problems and make a report” to the
academic community. Such a committee would “give some time to the study and
[have] full access to the records. They should be allowed to see the . . .
files themselves. They should also see what omissions we have made because
of objections in the Department or from foreign governments.”85

Following Perkins’s proposal, the Department invited
scholars to a conference on the Foreign Relations
series in October 1944. The agenda focused on editorial matters like the
format, timeliness, scope, and annotations in the volumes. One attendee,
Harvard law professor Manley O. Hudson, suggested that—for some academic
purposes—the “series ‘presents too little too late.’” Hudson evaluated the
utility of the series from a variety of academic disciplinary perspectives.
To improve FRUS for historians, he urged the
Department to streamline and accelerate the volumes. “For people interested
in our current international relations,” Hudson concluded, “the excellent
material in the volumes is wasted. It only appears after the occasion for
its use has passed.”86 Although there is no
evidence that the 1944 FRUS conference resulted in
significant changes in editorial practice or afforded scholars an
opportunity to compare published volumes with the unpublished record, it did
foreshadow increasingly close collaboration regarding the series between the
academic community and Department historians.87

Between 1920 and 1945, the Department of State
released 56 FRUS volumes covering the years between
1913 and 1930. The average lag in publication doubled during the period. In
the tense international atmosphere of the late 1930s and the war years,
releasing sensitive documents that drew attention to the post-World War I
settlement seemed unnecessarily risky to many in Europe and East Asia, but
essential to democratic accountability in the United States. Balancing
transparency and national security grew increasingly difficult during the
1930s and produced additional kinds of tension during the Second World War.
In February 1945, as the prospect of victory over Germany came into view,
Wilder Spaulding reported to Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish
that “our first objective in publishing [FRUS]
volumes is to produce a ‘substantially’ complete and honest definitive
record which should, so far as possible, be above criticism by experts who
are inevitably suspecting the Department of suppression of the record.” In
balancing demands for timeliness and concerns for security, Spaulding
predicted that “the nearest approach we can make to the ideal time lag would
be ten years.”88
Despite John Bassett Moore’s persistent calls to restore FRUS to its 19th century standard of currency,89 even the series’s most ardent supporters no longer
believed a one-year line possible. Nor did they consider it advisable. The
events of the two decades after the 1925 Kellogg Order caused openness
advocates to support a new transparency paradigm centered on historical
accountability that arose after World War I. Nevertheless, the clearance
battles of 1930–1945 paled in comparison to the controversies that buffeted
FRUS as the United States waged the Cold War.

The interwar critique of 19th and early 20th
century FRUS volumes presented here differs from
our own assessment as described in previous chapters. No other account
of the series has utilized the wide variety of sources consulted for
this study. Detractors in the 1920s and 1930s applied their contemporary
expectations for historical coverage to past volumes without
appreciating that the series served a different function between 1861
and 1906. They also did not account for documentation included in
Supplemental FRUS Submissions. They denigrated
the proto-professional documentary editing capacities of compilers and
reviewers rather than acknowledging that these capacities were
state-of-the-art for the time period. After Adee’s death in 1924, no
direct institutional memory of 19th century practice remained in the
Department. Disparagement of the “old” FRUS may
have also proved advantageous in attempts to secure additional funding
and more highly-qualified personnel to produce the series.↩

Hunt had worked on citizenship issues within
the Department from 1903 to 1909 and 1915 to 1918 and served as Chief of
the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress from 1909 to 1917.
He received several honorary degrees, including a Litt. D. degree from
Washington and Lee University in 1912 and LL.D. degrees from the
University of South Carolina and the College of William and Mary in 1912
and 1913. See Register of the Department of
State, January 1, 1924 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1924), p. 144 and “Gaillard Hunt Dies Suddenly,” Washington Post, March 21, 1924, p. 2.↩

Robert
Lansing to Gaillard Hunt, October 1, 1918, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929,
026 History of the World War/2; Hunt to Lansing, August 25, 1919, NARA,
RG 59, CDF 1910–1929, 026 History of the World War/3; and Hunt to
Lansing, December 27, 1919, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929, 026 History of
the World War/4.↩

George Moses to Hughes, May 27, 1922, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929, 026
History of the World War/5E and F[red] K N[ielsen] to Hughes, June 22,
1922, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929, 026 History of the World
War/5F.↩

Dwight led the Division of Publications between
April 26 and December 22, 1924. Before joining the Department in 1920,
Dwight had been a Deputy Consul and newspaper correspondent in Venice
(1898–1902) and curator of the New York Authors Club (1903–1906). See
Register of the Department of State, January
1, 1925 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1925), pp. 123.↩

In 1924, Carr’s assigned
duties as the Director of the Consular Service included handling “the
preparation of all estimates of appropriations for the Department . . .
and their presentation to Congress.” Wright’s duties as Third Assistant
Secretary of State included “the preparation of the correspondence upon
any question arising in the course of public business.” The Division of
Publications was assigned “preparation of volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States and the History of the World War.” See Register of the Department of State, January 1, 1924
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924), pp. 23–24 and 32.↩

See, passim, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929, 026 History
of the World War/14 through 026 History of the World War/34. See also
Hearing Before the Subcommittee of House Committee
on Appropriations: Department of State Appropriation Bill,
1925, 68th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1924), pp. 14–18 and Hearing Before the
Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations: Appropriations,
Department of State, 1926, 68th Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1925), pp. 11–12.↩

“Britain to Publish Pre-War Documents,”
New York Times, December 3, 1924, p. 5. For
analysis of the international context of diplomatic documentary
publications in the 1920s, see Zala, Geschichte unter
der Schere politischer Zensur.↩

Dennett, a former
Congregational minister and journalist, earned a Ph.D. in U.S.
diplomatic history from the Johns Hopkins University in 1924 and wrote
two well-regarded books on U.S.-East Asian relations before beginning
his tenure in the Department. After leaving the Department, he earned a
Pulitzer Prize for his biography of former Secretary of State John Hay
and subsequently became President of Williams College. See “Tyler
Dennett to Head State Publications,” Washington
Post, December 12, 1924, p. 11; “State Department Editor.
Secretary Hughes’s Selection of Tyler Dennett is Commended,” New York Times, December 24, 1924, p. 14; and
“Dr. Dennett Chosen to Head Williams,” New York
Times, May 13, 1934, p. N1. Dr. Joseph
Fuller joined the Research Branch of DP in June 1925 and became its
chief (and de facto general editor of FRUS) in
1930. Fuller served as an assistant professor of history at the
University of California in 1919–1920 before earning a Ph.D. from
Harvard University in 1921 (his dissertation explored Bismarck’s
diplomacy). From 1922 to 1925, he was assistant professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin. See “Dr. J.V. Fuller, Historian, Is Dead,”
New York Times, April 2, 1932, p. 23. With the exception of Hunter Miller between 1931 and
1933, every Department official immediately responsible for FRUS has held a Ph.D. in history or political
science since 1924. When Miller, who held an
LL.M., succeeded Dennett in 1931, he focused on preparing the Treaties and Other International Acts of the United
States of America publication and delegated FRUS-related tasks to his deputy, Cyril Wynne (Ph.D., Harvard,
1927). In 1932, Fuller’s replacement Morrison
Giffen (Ph.D., University of Chicago) recommended against making
austerity cuts to the Research Section of the Office of the Historical
Adviser: “Although it might be possible to continue FRUS with “men of lower grade and lower pay,” Giffen argued
that the “increasingly exacting” task of selecting documents from the
“growing volume” of Department records required “qualities of skill,
experience, knowledge, and judgment which, while not precisely rare, are
certainly not universal among even educated men.” Maintaining the new
professional standards introduced in the mid-1920s required greater
expenditures than giving the work to “raw boys just out of college.”
Giffen warned “their product would have to be thoroughly overhauled to
guard against omissions, errors, and faults of judgment” before it could
be used by the Department—or released to the public. In 1933, the
Department created a new Division of Research and Publications (which
was responsible for FRUS) alongside the Office of
the Historical Adviser (which retained responsibility for compiling the
Treaties and Other International Acts of the
United States of America volumes). As the first head of
Research and Publications, Wynne took formal charge of FRUS production at that time. The Office of the Historical
Adviser was renamed the Office of the Editor of the Treaties in 1938.
See Morrison Giffen to Wynne, December 21, 1932, NARA, RG 59, Unindexed
Records (Central Files), 1910–1944, Box 5, 1932 and “Office Heads and
Organization Designations Since 1921” in appendix D.↩

Dennett to Frank Kellogg, March 26, 1925, NARA, RG
59, Miscellaneous Office Files, 1910–1944, Box 35, 55D606 OSS/PB–1. A
later account of the background for this order explained that one of the
purposes for formalizing and publishing the principles governing FRUS was to enable the Department to “‘head off’
the criticisms the Department was receiving because the Foreign Relations volumes were allegedly in
arrears and allegedly incomplete. These criticisms came from academia,
they came from Capitol Hill—and they came from a former Secretary of
State, the Honorable Charles E. Hughes.” See Cyril Wynne, “Memorandum on
the subject of Dr. D. C. Poole’s letter . . . ,” July 13, 1937, pp. 6–7,
NARA, RG 59, CDF 1930–1939, 026 Foreign
Relations/1210.↩

Key
supporters included Undersecretary Joseph Grew, Assistant Secretary John
V.A. MacMurray, Assistant Secretary Wilbur Carr, and Western European
Affairs Division Chief William Castle. Grew’s support for releasing
historical documents was not universal. In 1926, he overruled
subordinates in the Department to block release of an 1865 instruction
from Secretary of State William Seward to the U.S. Minister in France,
John Bigelow, in response to a congressional request on behalf of a
constituent researcher. The instruction included the statement that “the
United States has at various times since its organization found
necessity for expansion and that the like necessity may reasonably be
expected to occur hereafter.” Grew objected to releasing this statement
because “if published, even though sixty years old, [it] would
inevitably cause undesirable discussion in Mexico and the other
countries of Latin America as tending to substantiate their traditional
charge that the United States is endeavoring and intends eventually to
obtain political hegemony throughout the two continents.” See Grew to
Margaret Hanna, April 30, 1926, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929,
116.3/1047.↩

For policy regarding FGI in the 1920s, see
Dennett, “The Publication Policy of the Department of State,” Foreign Affairs (January 1930), p. 301; Arthur
Kogan, “Department of State Publication of Foreign Government
Documents,” June 1981, Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs,
Office of the Historian, Research Projects File, 1955–2011 (Lot File
13D289) (henceforth HO Research Projects Lot File 13D289), Box 7, R.P.
No. 1261: Department of State Publication of Foreign Government
Documents. See especially Documents 2–4 (Dennett to William Vallance,
May 12, 1926; Hanna to Dennett, May 20, 1926; and Dennett to William
Vallance and Hanna, May 25, 1926 in NARA, RG 59, CDF 1910–1929,
811.114/4517) and 7 (Wilder Spaulding to Breckinridge Long, March 1,
1940, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign
Relations/1456) attached to Kogan, “Department of State
Publication of Foreign Government Documents.” The March 26, 1925 order
was first published in the preface to Papers Relating
to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914 Supplement: The
World War (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928), pp.
iii–iv. In the 19th century, the Department had ignored foreign
government equities entirely. See Frederick Frelinghuysen to Philip
Morgan, August 28, 1883, pp. 657–658, NARA, RG 59, Diplomatic
Instructions—Mexico, M77, Reel 116.↩

While Duke University historian Paul Clyde in 1940 “concluded that the
Lansing Papers enrich substantially our
knowledge of the bases of American policy during the World War [I]
years,” Wilder Spaulding (who was then responsible for FRUS) believed the Lansing supplements did not “contribute
very much that is new to what is already known about American policy . .
. but . . . show how many phases of that policy were arrived at.” Paul
Clyde review of Papers Relating to the Foreign
Relations of the United States, The Lansing Papers, 1914–1920
in Hispanic American Historical Review (November
1940), pp. 614–616 (quote from p. 616) and Spaulding to John Bassett
Moore, March 7, 1940, LCM, Moore Papers, Box 80, General Correspondence:
Spaulding, E. Wilder 1940. Over 70 years later,
David Langbart, an archivist at the National Archives and a leading
expert on U.S. diplomatic records, echoed Clyde’s contention that the
Lansing volumes “fill[ed] a gap in FRUS’s
coverage of a critical period.” See David Langbart, “Special FRUS Volumes: Origins of the ‘Lansing Papers,’”
November 30, 2011, Department of State, Office of the Historian website,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus-history/research/special-frus-volumes.↩

For the
significance of actors outside the Department of State in U.S. foreign
policy during the 1920s, see Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in
Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 1977); Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European
Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and
Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984).↩

D[eWitt] C[linton] Poole to Hull, June 21, 1937,
NARA, RG 59, CDF 1930–1939, 026 Foreign
Relations/1187. Poole could also be considered the first member of
the nascent U.S. intelligence community to criticize FRUS for endangering intelligence sources and methods. For
Poole’s role as U.S. liaison with anti-Bolshevik Russians and later as
the acting Consul General (and de facto chief of
U.S. intelligence-gathering in European Russia), see David Langbart,
“‘Spare No Expense:’ The Department of State and the Search for
Information About Bolshevik Russia, November 1917–September 1918,” Intelligence and National Security (April 1989),
pp. 316–334. In July 1939, Poole published a more temperate review of
the two 1923 FRUS volumes in Public Opinion Quarterly, pp. 528–529.↩

The
release of the World War I and Russian Revolution supplemental FRUS volumes was covered in major newspapers. See
“Secrecy of War Lifts,” Los Angeles Times,
October 20, 1930, p. 1; “Details Our Fight on Role in Siberia,” New York Times, July 30, 1932, p. 13; “Tells of
Our Stand in Russian Revolt,” New York Times,
November 20, 1932, p. 23; “Dire Need of Allies in 1917 is Revealed,” New York Times, November 21, 1932, p. 4; “War
Papers Bare Peace Pleas to US,” New York Times,
June 28, 1933, p. 14; and “Book Shows Rift Over Soviet in 1919,” New York Times, June 13, 1937, p. 27. Regular
annual volumes also received press attention. See, for example, “Our
1919 Diplomacy Revealed in Book,” New York Times,
December 29, 1934, p. 13; “Diplomatic Papers to 1920 Published,” New York Times, May 3, 1936, p. E6; and
“U.S.-Japan Accord Had Secret Clause,” New York
Times, June 10, 1938, p. 10.↩

See Dennett, “Office of the Historical Adviser,”
American Foreign Service Journal, September
1929, pp. 293–296 and Dennett, “The Publication Policy of the Department
of State,” Foreign Affairs, January 1930, pp.
301–305.↩

Winant to
Secretary of State, July 12, 1943, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations (P.C. 1919)/87 and Anthony Eden
to Winant, July 9, 1943 enclosed in Waldemar Gallman to Secretary of
State, July 12, 1943, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations (P.C. 1919)/88. For the U.S. request for
British permission to print the Council of Four minutes, which asked for
supplementary documents from British records, see E[rnest] R[alph]
Perkins to Spaulding, March 31, 1943 and Shaw to Winant, April 10, 1943
in NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign
Relations (P.C. 1919)/77a. British skittishness about these
particular records should not have been a surprise. The British
expressly limited their previous clearances to a narrow portion of the
overall record of the Paris Peace Conference records and objected when
the preface for the first two published volumes pledged that the
Department would release the rest of the Paris Conference documentation
in future volumes. See Stephen Gaselee to Gallman, March 25, 1943
enclosed in Gallman to Secretary of State, April 2, 1943, NARA, RG 59,
CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations (P.C.
1919)/77.↩

Hull to
[Roosevelt], September 9, 1943, Foreign Relations of
the United States: The Conferences at Washington and Quebec,
1943, pp. 1334–1335. See also Spaulding to Secretary of State (with
attached draft Secretary of State to President), September 9, 1943
attached to Axton to Perkins, August 27, 1945, NARA, RG 59, CDF
1945–1949, 026 Foreign Relations (P.C.
1919)/8–2745.↩

See footnoted annotation to W[inston]
C[hurchill] to Eden, September 13, 1943, Foreign
Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington and
Quebec, 1943, p. 1338. See also Spaulding to John Hickerson,
Shaw, Blanche Halla, and Hull, September 20, 1943, NARA, RG 59,
Unindexed Records (Central Files), 1910–1944, Box 13, 1943–Sept. and
Hull to U.S. Embassy London, September 20, 1943, NARA, RG 59, CDF
1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations (P.C. 1919)/87.
After Roosevelt vetoed publication of the Council of Four minutes, the
Division of European Affairs objected to publishing the minutes of the
Supreme Economic Council, chiefly because of essential material touching
upon “the very delicate subject . . . of the western frontiers of the
USSR.” This volume was not published until 1947. See passim, NARA, RG 59, Miscellaneous Office Files, 1910–1944,
Box 35, 55D-606-OSS/PB–8 and “Reasons for Publishing Foreign Relations, Paris Peace Conference, Volume X,” February
23, 1944, NARA, RG 59, Miscellaneous Office Files, 1910–1944, Box 35,
55D-606-OSS/PB–10. The minutes were printed in Papers
Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The
Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. X.↩

Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. V and Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. VI.↩

Spaulding to
Matthews, Shaw, Edward Stettinius, and Hull, October 18, 1943, NARA, RG
59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations/1685a.
Newspaper coverage characterized the volumes as a “white paper,” not
part of the Foreign Relations series. The New York Times printed the introductory narrative
for the “Peace and War” compilation. See Joseph Cloud, “U.S. Warned of
Jap Attack Year Before They Struck,” Washington
Post, January 3, 1943, p. 1; “Hull’s Text on American White
Paper,” Washington Post, January 3, 1943, p. 5;
“Peace and War—United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941,” New York Times, January 6, 1943, pp. A1–A10;
“Hail Publication of ‘Peace and War’: Hull and Many Other Officials Say
Printing of Text Adds to Knowledge of Issues,” New
York Times, January 7, 1943, p. 7. The “Peace and War” volumes
indeed lacked important documentation of U.S. policy toward Japan.
Comprehensive documentation of the subject required publication of
additional records in regular annual volumes focused upon East Asia
published between 1946 and 1962. The first to appear was Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1931, vol. III, The Far East and the last was Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic
Papers, 1941, vol. V, The Far East.↩

Spaulding to James Dunn, September 22, 1943;
[Robert?] Stewart to Dunn, September 30, 1943; Spaulding to Matthews,
Shaw, Stettinius, and Hull, October 18, 1943; and Spaulding to John
Dickey, April 15, 1944 in NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations/1685a and Hull to Roosevelt,
April 25, 1944; Roosevelt to Hull, April 26, 1944; and Hull to
Roosevelt, June 22, 1944 in NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations/1694.↩

See Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the
Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).↩

See Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of
Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 71–106. Archibald MacLeish,
one of the architects of “white propaganda” in the Office of War
Information, became the first Assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs. From this post, he oversaw the Division of Research and
Publication as World War II ended. His ideas about “white propaganda”
influenced FRUS in the early Cold War. See chapter 7.↩

Ernest Ralph Perkins, who was
among the initial cohort of professional historians who joined the
Department to implement Dennett’s modernization program, was the
longest-serving General Editor-equivalent in FRUS’s history. After completing his Ph.D. at Clark University in
1930, Perkins joined the Office of the Historical Adviser as a research
assistant. By 1938, Perkins had risen to become head of the research
section of RP, a position retitled “Editor of Foreign
Relations of the United States” in 1944. Perkins retained this
position (through several more office name and position title changes)
until 1963.↩

It is possible that the conference persuaded RP
to adopt Fuller’s ideas to prepare separate topical volumes for each
year’s documentation. The 1932 annual volumes, released in 1947 and
1948, adopted this approach. Compilation for these volumes “was
underway” in June 1944. See “Division of Research and Publication
Progress Report, May 15–May 31, 1944,” June 1, 1944, NARA, RG 59,
Unindexed Records (Central Files), 1910–1944, Box 15, 1944 June.↩

Spaulding to
MacLeish, February 3, 1945, NARA, RG 59, CDF 1940–1944, 026 Foreign Relations/2–345. Spaulding’s memorandum
concluded with a plea to augment the Department’s historical research
capacities to allow for a policy-supportive “research program and . . .
special research studies,” to avoid “causing delay in the Foreign Relations program” by “borrowing” FRUS historians for such functions.↩